Indiana's grading system favors charter, private schools

Now that the stench from the recent Tony Bennett A-F grade fixing scandal has dissipated, we can turn our attention to the bigger issue at hand, and that is whether an A-F grading system for K-12 education makes any sense at all. A majority of our state legislators, elected officials and the public seem to think it's a good idea to hold schools accountable for ensuring that all children receive a good education. That sounds simple enough. But if it were simple, then how could Bennett and his staff mess it up so badly that they had to react like the Keystone cops mere days before the grades were to be reported and then retool the system to address what they thought were its defects?

When I think about all the money sloshing around among the politicians, the reform-minded think tanks, the legislative agenda lobbying organizations like ALEC, the education testing and learning materials publishing industry and the foundations created by billionaires, it's incomprehensible that anyone with Bennett's credentials (and arrogance) could introduce a such a half-baked school grading system.

But the reality is that the grading system they came up with wasn't necessarily defective at all. In their view, its problem was that it didn't accommodate and support a set of preconceived notions about what constitutes a successful school. Sadly, one of those notions is that the grading system must not take into account that there are very significant differences between charter schools, private schools and public schools. The biggest difference being that charter and private schools can screen out applicants, including special needs students and English as second language students, and then also dismiss admitted students who are subsequently deemed to be "not a good fit."

A grading system that was truly intended to be fair, transparent and intellectually honest would ensure that the playing field for comparison is level among all participating schools, and to achieve that would take into consideration many factors, too many to enumerate here, that impact school performance. And that would likely require a very complex evaluation process, one that would take years to analyze and refine by a centralized government education bureaucracy in Indianapolis. And there's the real rub. It is the apogee of hypocrisy for conservative politicians and government leaders in Indiana to be advocates for a centralized government program to influence parents with a grading system that incorporates a hidden agenda and has little to do with school accountability. The process of evaluating which school your child should attend is one that belongs at the most local unit of government, and that is the family home. Parents should exert great effort to avail themselves of every source of information to determine the right fit for their child's needs and their family's circumstances. But Indiana's A-F grading system is not one of them, because of its inherent bias in favor of charter and private schools. It should be scrapped for good.

Patrick J. Wiltshire

LaGrange

ADVERTISEMENT

ADVERTISEMENT

ADVERTISEMENT

Email this article

Indiana's grading system favors charter, private schools

Now that the stench from the recent Tony Bennett A-F grade fixing scandal has dissipated, we can turn our attention to the bigger issue at hand, and that is whether an A-F grading system for K-12